New Study Reveals Bartenders, Casino Workers Most Likely to Get Divorced

Maybe think twice before marrying a bartender or flight attendant.

New data shows that old stereotype about bartenders is true: the occupation has the highest divorce rate in America. According to data gathered and newly presented by FlowingData from the 2015 American Community Survey, people who work in fields involving nightlife or extensive travel have the highest divorce rates in the nation.

The occupations least likely to get divorced include actuaries, scientists, medical professionals, and software developers. One could generalize that these fields tend to attract level-headed professionals who prefer efficiency and that the fields boasting the highest divorce rate encourage fluid schedules, but there’s also the question of income.

According to the data, occupations with higher annual incomes (on average) tend to see fewer divorces. There is also a correlation between income, divorce rate, and the likelihood that a child will get sick, which feels like a perfect storm of awful factors.

There's a slight positive correlation between an occupation's annual salary and the likelihood that someone in that occupation will go through a divorce.

When all the occupations are grouped together on a single scatter plot, they do crowd around the mean national rate of divorce, which was just above 35 percent of marriages in 2015.

Once the occupational data is broken up by professional field, it’s easy to see which jobs adhere more closely to a pattern. For instance, any jobs related to transportation, shipping, or travel have higher divorce rates than the national average.

Meanwhile, on the other end of the spectrum, the jobs with the lowest rate of divorce are either, as mentioned above, related to mathematics or science, or are popular fields in rural areas, like the military, farming, fishing, or forestry.

You can read the full study and interact with the data at FlowingData.

If you liked this article about relationship data, check out this video about monogamy and boners (obviously).